Safety tips for shopping online

Tools

Story Published: Dec 3, 2008 at 5:18 PM MST

Story Updated: Dec 3, 2008 at 5:18 PM MST

By Araksya Karapetyan

Cyber Monday has come and gone, but shopping online is still the number one way many people will choose to shop for the holidays. Here are a couple tips to help YOU be extra cautious, while you shopping online.

TIP ONE
DON'T GET HOOKED BY PHISHING.
Phishing scams use fraudulent emails and websites to impersonate legitimate businesses.
They try to get you to disclose your personal information.
Legitimate businesses will never send an email asking you to update personal information.

TIP TWO-DON'T ENTER YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION ONTO A POP-UP SCREEN.
Phishers may direct you to a real company's or organization's website, and that's when an unauthorized pop-up screen will appear.
Best thing to do, is to install pop up blocking software.

TIP THREE-CHECK THAT A WEBSITE IS SECURE, BEFORE YOU ENTER YOUR PERSONAL INFO.
You can do this by simply looking to see if there is a lock icon on the browser's status bar or a URL for a website that starts with "https"
The "S" indicates "secure"

TIP FOUR- KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING ONLINE.
Using free security software, like AVG, ANTI-VIRUS, or ANTI-SPYWARE that can warn you about risky sites that might have virus or spyware before you click on them.

TIP FIVE-USE STRONG PASSWORDS.
When you make a user profile on a retail site, be sure to create passwords that combine letters with both upper and lower case, numbers and special characters.Also, make it more then 6 characters in length.

Using mixed characters decreases the chances of your personal information from being hacked or duplicated. And it's always a good idea to not always use the same password for all of your accounts.

More news articles

Current Weather

Current Temp 33.0 °F

Fair

Video

More Weather

Current Weather

More Weather

Upload directly from your mobile device.

Learn how

YouNews

This content requires the latest Adobe Flash Player and a browser with JavaScript enabled. Click here for a free download of the latest Adobe Flash Player.